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Monthly Archives: July 2011

B-side books (Self Produced & Limited Editions) is an independent editorial project whose philosophy is to be a platform for the self-production and distribution of limited editions and books related to urban mobility and the interpretation of the territory produced and transformed by these movements.
Created by Carlos Albalá & Ignasi López, B-side books explores different and carefully curated ways of materializing the work of artists in the world of printed publication

” LE GARAGE is an itinerant exhibition project born out of a common love for photography-related books and publications.

We are a small group of photographers and photo enthusiasts based in Paris. We launched the collective project LE GARAGE to develop the interest, fecundity, and creativity characterizing the phenomenon of the photobook today. By welcoming new works in development, all related by their consideration for the form of the photobook, LE GARAGE offers an insight into one of the most dynamic fields of today’s photographic practice.

Began at the Rencontres d’Arles Festival in July 2010, the original exhibition featured a curated series of 35 photography artist books and book dummies, chosen for their merit and the extent to which they pushed the twin mediums of photography and photography books.

During the following year, we had the opportunity to further show a selection of LE GARAGE twice more, at the Chateau d’Eau gallery in Toulouse and at Le Bal in Paris. ”

Youssef Nabil observes his life as if he were in a cinema, watching and witnessing every minute of his own movie. When he realised, as a child, that many of his favourite Egyptian film stars were no longer alive, this kindled a desire to meet those who were still living and to immortalise them. In doing this, he created an imaginary reality that reflects both the paradoxes of the Middle East in our times and the fantasies and flamboyance of Egyptian movie stars in the cosmopolitan pre-revolutionary years.

Nabil began his photographic career in 1992 by staging tableaux in which his friends acted out melodramas recalling film stills from the golden age of Egyptian cinema. Later in the 1990s, while working as a photographer’s assistant in New York and Paris, he began a series of photographs of artists, portraying them in dream-like situations that were a long way from their public personas. On his return to Egypt in 1999 he further developed his unique photographic approach, hand-colouring his black-and-white gelatin-silver prints. Like the Egyptian films of his youth, this new approach removes the blemishes of reality and fuses contemporary art and popular culture. Now based in Paris and New York, Nabil also produces self-portraits reflecting his fragmented life away from Egypt.

You Never Left was first shown in the exhibition Told/Untold/Retold, held to mark the inauguration of the Mathaf in Doha in December 2010, and met with great critical success, establishing Youssef Nabil as part of a “New Wave” of Arab artists injecting fresh dynamism into the international art scene.

UnrealCity is a series of photographs of construction projects in various countries such as, Iran, France, United States, Germany, etc. This series was formed during the trips in order to find something known in new landscapes.Originally from Tehran, I found abroad the opportunity to reactivate the imaginary associated with this city: a construction site.

Playing a contradictory role in the urban scene, constructions constitute both signs of construction and ruin, a silent off-screen of the city, something that is hidden, how the change of a scene is usually hidden in the theatre. Therefore it is important for me to produce an image of a construction as it is, I eliminated the geographical references. The construction as a degree zero of the architecture, however, an existing multitude of signs subsist them as singular urban forms.